1. Technical Field
This application relates to search engines. In particular, this application relates to expanding queries based on learned popularity rankings.
2. Related Art
The availability of powerful tools for developing and distributing Internet content has led to an increase in information, products, and services offered through the Internet, as well as a dramatic growth in the number and types of consumers using the Internet. To sift through this immense volume of information, a user often submits queries to search engines that provide responsive information that meets the criteria specified by the queries.
For example, user queries that include geographic content may enable enterprises to identify entities, such as place names, street addresses, or other entities associated with a specific physical location. Geographic or other query types may provide an important source of revenue for e-commerce enterprises, such as Internet-based search engines, advertisers, etc. E-commerce enterprises provide results to a user based on the user's submitted query terms or other relevant information. In this manner, such enterprises may provide advertising and other information or content to the user.
However, a user query may not always result in an exact relevant match, often resulting in a user having to refine or abandon the search. In the example of a geographic query, an on-line search for “pizza in San Marino, Calif.” may not produce any actual matches on “pizza” in the locality of “San Marino.” However, there may be relevant results located near the location queried by the user, such as in a neighboring locality. Those results should be found and provided to the user even though the original search terms did not contain those specific nearby locations. More generally, there may often be information, advertisements, media, or other potential search results that do not exactly match a user's query terms, but would nonetheless be relevant to the user's query and should thus be found and provided to the user.
A need therefore exists for a system that expands queries to better match a user's preferred query scope.